I Welcome Your Hatred
by AnimaDaemon
Summary: Natasha explains why they cannot love. Natasha/Clint. Oneshot. Angst.


I Welcome Your Hatred.

_Oh my~ what the hell? I don't ever write het. It just BURST out of me._  
><em>I don't know these characters well, so my perception of them is very narrow indeed; but I hope you enjoy!<em>  
><em>Oh, and I guess this as an AU? Because I have no idea where it would fit in at all.<em>

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><p>There was an inherent kind of sadness in the way his hands smoothed their way up Natasha's thighs for the last time.<p>

She was splayed open. She was vulnerable. But she was open to all and every feeling; the tremble of nervous hands. The rattling of a gasp. The blunt pressure of teeth.

All swirled together in a cacophony of sensation.

Too much, too little.

The tick, tick ticking of the clock ebbed on her outer conscious. The dull murmur of the radio whispered its distraction. The rain tapped the window pain, beckoning.

So she welcomed white noise like an old friend and gave in; gave in to the sound of their shallow breathing.

His tongue was cold against her. Her toes curled into twisted sheets when his lips met her intimately, hands still shook distantly where they delicately angled her legs apart.

She was _exposed_. But she couldn't hold down the sound of pleasure as he took a long swipe with his tongue, running it languorously over a certain bundle of finely-tuned nerves.

She was lost in this. Lost in the sound of breathing. Lost in the burning feeling of building pleasure.

Lost in the feeling of teeth and tongue and callouses and his _contempt._

His fingers turned into stinging points of pressure as they tensed against her white thighs. The tremors from his hands wracked their way up her body. She hissed her irritation at him and tried to find his eyes, neck tensing against the angle.

She saw fire in the deepest shade of blue. A face like a storm pressed against her hip bone.

Then he snapped, like a string pulled taught.

"I can't- I _won't_ do this." It was nothing but a vicious whisper against her flesh, a slide of teeth has he grimaced into her abdomen.

She felt sadness and annoyance and anger pull at her throat, suddenly, dangerously. She cleared the feelings with a short cough and his eyes brightened curiously.

"You don't have a choice." She started, tone low.

"I've _always_ got a choice-"

"No. You don't. If you want this, if you want to fuck me before I, how was it you put it? _Slink back into the shadows_, you do it now or you do it never." She stared down at the tension lines appearing around his eyes, his mouth.

"_You don't need to go anywhere! _Nat, Natasha I lo-"

Instinct struck like a whip. Her thighs locked around his neck in a suffocating iron-grip and her hand twitched violently for the feel of her blade-

Anything to stop _that word. _

_Anything._

"Love? We don't _love_ Clint! I have love for a blade; love is for material things, love is for things that that can be lost. _Don't you get it?!_

He flattened his palms and _pushed_ against the pressure of the hold. She relented; something weary crawled up her spine as he repositioned himself over her waist.

"I don't." It was a simple admission. It was honest and Natasha's wondered how much _restraint_ it had taken to speak the words.

"I love this blade." She pulled a sleek, black metallic blade from the pillow under her head and rested it downwards against her pale, thin wrist. The contrast between skin and metal was deadly in the half-light.

"I love this blade because it's my best blade, Clint. But I also love this blade _because I can replace it._ I can lose this blade, but I can also get another that is just as good."

She could still hear their breathing. Her eyes were finely attuned to nothing but Clint Barton's sharp gaze; blue like cracked spheres of glass.

He stayed silent.

"I can't replace a person."

Her words seemed to shatter him completely. Frown lines deeper marred his brow and Natasha shifted under his weight.

His desperate eyes stripped her already naked flesh bare and she shivered despite herself.

"Nat-" His voice cracked.

"I welcome your hatred Clint! It's not _hard _to lose something you hate!"

He dived for her, then. He managed to snare her left wrist and pull it high above her head, but the right was pressed against his throat quicker than he could move, in a flash of movement and glinting, ominous black.

They stayed like that; still. Muscles locked in place. Positions bitingly ridged.

The blade Natasha held with a light pressure under Clint's adams apple. If he were a lesser man, he would have swallowed and nicked himself on the sharp edge. But Clint wasn't a lesser man and Natasha _knew it_.

"I owe you a debt. I owe you _this night._" She whispered into the stillness of the room.

"You don't owe me _anything._"

Sickly, dusty morning light fell in slats over Natasha's naked breasts and face with the rising sun. Clint followed them with his broken eyes, took in the body laid beneath him.

She pulled the blade swiftly away and once again it was hidden from all sight with a fast, skilled precision.

"_I owe you everything." _Her murmured words were lost in the silence between them.

Things felt heavier, then. Like the quiet before a hurricane; stifling and foreboding. And Natasha's composure slid; her mask cracked.

Her eyes were hurt, pleading and _wrong _in her finely boned face.

It was all he needed from her and she felt the sickening shame of being laid bare twist her insides.

And if the walls could speak, they would have spoken of the way Clint swooped down to press against full lips in a bruising kiss. They would have spoken of the tense line of his shoulders as he twined his hand in hair so vibrantly red it was closer to the colour of a dying ember. They would have spoken of Natasha's arms and legs as they wrapped around his lithe body in a grip that probably hurt. They would of spoken of her biting into his lips; softly, affectionately.

They would have spoken of the passion when their hips rolled together, their groans dancing across the air between them.

Actions spoke for the words left unsaid between them as tongues twined messily; the kiss desperate, hungry.

By the time Clint took her, by the time he pushed himself to the very brink of his physical limit inside of her, she felt the burn, the fiery burn of orgasm a breath away and she slid her hands up both sides of his face, made him _look at her._

His eyes were still spheres of shattered glass as they stared back.

_Good_.

That's the way she needed it to be.

The orgasm was mind-numbing and _perfect,_ but somehow she had the capacity to feel _fear _brought by the lack of control, the lack of sentience. She clung to his shoulders as he rode her through it and then they shuddered together, for the last time.

Too much, too little.

His forehead dropped down heavily to hers. She did not point it out to him when a tear slid slowly down her cheek that wasn't her own.

She just breathed with him for that moment. In unison. Together.

She lets the world back in slowly, after that. The white noise receded from her mind like heavy fog in the piercing morning light. The noises of other existing things slowly seeped back into the room, along with her sense of safety; along with her armour. She relished in the reality of the world around them. Relished in the notion that there is _life_ outside of them. Outside of this.

But his eyes were still broken. And she didn't realise it, didn't even know it, but so were her own.

And again, if those walls had been able to speak, they would have talked about the silence between them as they clung fiercely, post-coital and wrapped around each other in the morning light, both unwilling to slip into sleep, both angry, hateful and desperate.

The clock was still tick, tick ticking. The radio was still murmuring. The rain was still tapping.

She was gone by noon. Gone with the last of the morning shadows.

She left him in sleep with a lingering, cracked smile and a light kiss on the forehead.

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><p>Clint woke to a sleek, black blade resting on the pillow besides his face. It was seated on a note written in Natasha's easy scrawl.<p>

Stress lines followed his deep frown as he tugged the paper from under the blade and grasped it in shaking fingers.

The bold noon light filtering from the cracked blinds lit the paper a blinding white, the words a stark and dangerous contrast in black.

He took a deep, hitched breath and scanned the small script.

'_Welcome my hatred. Take this hate and let it define us. Love is for children – N'_

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><p><em>Like I said, I don't know the characters and or story so well :( But some things are deliberate, for example Clint's shaking hands show how terribly 'shaken' he is by the situation with Nat; for Hawkeye's hands to shake, it means he's under some serious emotional duress, people!<br>And Nat.. well.. I don't know, but considering her scene with Loki in the Avengers, my perception is that she doesn't have time for love, doesn't believe in it. But then, after I wrote this, I thought WHOA hang on, wasn't that just a charade to trick ol'Loke into divulging info? Dammnnitttt, I don't know. I hope you enjoyed, 'nywaysss._


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